


This is Everything

by firbolg_boyfriends



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (lol remember parties?), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Eye Contact, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Tarot, Trans Henry Cheng, Trans Richard Gansey III, alcohol and drug mentions, gansey waxing lyrical in his head, meaningful moments at a party
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:06:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26521882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firbolg_boyfriends/pseuds/firbolg_boyfriends
Summary: Henry smiled – an authentic smile this time, not like the one from before. It made Gansey feel like – he couldn’t look Henry in the eye. He just watched Henry’s hands as he produced a garishly colorful Lisa Frank tarot deck out of seemingly nowhere, and shuffled the cards almost hypnotically after sliding them out of the case, knuckles smooth and glimmering and geometrically sketched. “Draw three cards, Mr. Gansey.” His voice was sly and playful. The unexpected nickname hit like another glass of wine.“Three?” Gansey still didn’t trust himself to look at Henry’s eyes. He didn’t know why – he wasn’t sure what he thought would happen. He would fall under a spell, maybe. Be transported to fairyland and never return.“Mm-hmm. Past, present, future. Can you feel them all here tonight?”Henry gestured theatrically, and Gansey followed the arc of the rose gold rings on his hand through the hazy air. He hummed vaguely. He didn’t know exactly what Henry meant, but he felt like the words made sense in his own head. Maybe they made the same sense in Henry’s head.
Relationships: Henry Cheng/Richard Gansey III, Richard Gansey III & Blue Sargent
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	This is Everything

**Author's Note:**

> wow I can't believe I'm finally getting around to writing for my favorite piece of media of all time? <3
> 
> Imo chengsey is the most underrated ship in the history of humankind and I fully expect that maybe 3 people at most will read this fic but thank you so much to the 3 of you and I'm honored to be providing the chengsey content that all 4 of us deserve

“Can I do a tarot reading for you?”

It took Gansey an inappropriately long moment to process what Henry had said. Partially because the room was pounding with the electronic heartbeat of a remix of a remix of a remix of a forgettable pop song, and the tobacco smoke wafting in the dim purple-gold glow of string lights and the cluttered hum of overheard conversations and the proximity of the sweat and glitter on other people’s skin were all coalescing into a miasma of audiovisual background noise that was monopolizing most of the real estate in Gansey’s brain. But also partially because he hadn’t been expecting Henry to ask that – not that Gansey knew much about what generally happened at parties, but he was pretty sure tarot wasn’t on the list of standard template conversation openers.

It wasn’t that Gansey wasn’t familiar with tarot, of course. His friend’s moms were psychics and had laid out a spread of cryptic glossy-finished illustrations on the coffee table in front of him more times than he could count on two hands. His other friend was an enthusiast as well – and an analytical-minded law student, believe it or not. So tarot was something Gansey associated with friendship. Something intimate, done on dorm room carpets and kitchen counters and back porches in summer with people he loved more than he could express verbally.

Hearing Henry say the same words Blue had said to him so many times, in the same order she said them and almost with the same cadence – it was eerie, to say the least. There was a strange, backwards moment when Gansey’s heart reacted to the question the way it did when his friends spoke to him. It was as if Henry had done a magic trick to convince Gansey they were the best of friends, for just a split second.

But Gansey and Henry weren’t friends. Not really.

They were aware of each other in the way any trans student in a classroom full of cis people was at all times distantly aware of the only other trans person in the room – their presence at once comforting and alienating, an uneasy balance between the urge to approach them out of solidarity and the sense that doing so would only further establish an implicit separation from the rest of the group. And Henry just seemed like a very different person from Gansey, anyway. Gansey wore sweaters, and Henry wore sweaters laden with sequin-encrusted applique flowers and vibrantly-dyed feather accents. Gansey wore glasses, and Henry wore neon-rimmed diva shades when he was badly feigning the absence of a hangover. Gansey raised his hand in class to add tidbits from his arsenal of memorized trivia to the body of knowledge presented in the lecture, and Henry raised his hand in class to ask subtly snarky “gotcha” questions about the ethics of Western epistemology.

The only time they’d directly interacted before this Halloween party had been when Henry picked up a textbook Gansey had dropped – it was for another history class, this one on the European middle ages, not the twentieth-century world politics course he and Henry shared. “You look like you read this for fun,” Henry said appraisingly, a light smirk on his lips. (He was gone in a gleam of iridescent polyester before Gansey could figure out if he was being complimented or insulted.)

He’d seen Henry when he entered the house – with Blue, before she vanished to snoop through the host’s upstairs rooms, which Gansey refused to participate in. (“They invited us in here!” she insisted, at which he reminded her – to no avail, of course – that they’d found out about this party through a friend of a friend of a friend and the host probably didn’t even know who they were.)

Henry had been standing at the edge of a throng of people doing shots. It took Gansey a second to recognize him, because his makeup was more heavily applied than usual and he was dressed as what appeared to be… a sexy bee? He was wearing little round wings and a headband with spiral things sticking out of it and a rather revealing yellow-and-black striped outfit, at any rate. But Gansey knew it had to be him, because there was this expression on his face that was unmistakable. He wasn’t grinning ecstatically like everybody around him – he was grinning, but he looked like a model smiling for a magazine shoot, a celebrity smiling on the red carpet, a person practicing a smile in the mirror. And there was something in his eyes that was very… still. His eyes always looked that way, like water that hadn’t been touched by a ripple in hours. It struck Gansey on the first day of class, and it struck him even more at this party because it felt so out of context.

And then Henry turned his head slightly and they locked eyes and a flicker of recognition passed over Henry’s visage, and Gansey experienced a moment of panic in which he wasn’t sure if he should immediately glance away and keep walking, or awkwardly wave. (He settled on awkwardly waving while walking away.)

And now hours had passed and Gansey had a few more glasses of red wine and cheap beer in him than he’d had earlier that evening, and he was sitting in the stairwell because his head felt weird and he was tired of generating small talk, and Blue was probably somewhere upstairs smoking weed out of a window or lecturing some poor stranger about ecofeminism but he was too exhausted to look for her right this second. How did parties drain his batteries so fast? Thank god tomorrow was the weekend. He wondered what Ronan and Adam were up to. They never went to parties. (Maybe they were right.)

Except Henry was here, inexplicably sitting next to him – Gansey had no idea when he’d shown up, really. He wasn’t there, and then he was. And boy, was he there, in his patterned fishnets and towering hairstyle and sparkly cheekbones that could slice Gansey’s face off. And he evidently wanted to do a tarot reading for Gansey, even though Gansey was still trying to compute how this person even had such a skill, and why he wanted to do it for Gansey, whom he barely knew.

And then Gansey realized too much time was passing. “Sure,” he blurted.

Henry smiled – an authentic smile this time, not like the one from before. It made Gansey feel like – he couldn’t look Henry in the eye. He just watched Henry’s hands as he produced a garishly colorful Lisa Frank tarot deck out of seemingly nowhere, and shuffled the cards almost hypnotically after sliding them out of the case, knuckles smooth and glimmering and geometrically sketched. “Draw three cards, Mr. Gansey.” His voice was sly and playful. The unexpected nickname hit like another glass of wine.

“Three?” Gansey still didn’t trust himself to look at Henry’s eyes. He didn’t know why – he wasn’t sure what he thought would happen. He would fall under a spell, maybe. Be transported to fairyland and never return.

“Mm-hmm. Past, present, future. Can you feel them all here tonight?”

Henry gestured theatrically, and Gansey followed the arc of the rose gold rings on his hand through the hazy air. He hummed vaguely. He didn’t know exactly what Henry meant, but he felt like the words made sense in his own head. Maybe they made the same sense in Henry’s head.

Gansey studied Henry’s face as Henry focused on fanning the cards out on the carpeted stair he was sitting on – clumsily, earnestly determined in the way of a task-oriented tipsy person. His eyelashes fanned over his cheeks like dark crescent moons. His eyebrows were wickedly cut, but the corner of one had gotten slightly smudged at some point tonight, and Gansey found that oddly endearing. Even though he’d met Henry before, he felt like he was meeting him again, somehow. Or maybe he’d met a Henry that wasn’t as true as this one.

“What are you dressed as, Richard?” Henry asked as Gansey leaned down to carefully select three cards – he never knew exactly how to pick tarot cards out of a deck because every person gave him different advice about it. He was dressed as a ‘bad boy’ – theoretically, according to Blue, who’d forcibly handed him a leather jacket she’d ‘borrowed’ from Ronan’s closet and then made him change out of his yellow sweater into a boring black T-shirt. Gansey still wasn’t completely sold on this costume but it wasn’t like he had any better ideas.

His brow furrowed as he ran his thumb over a card that had fallen at a slightly odd angle. “How do you know my name is Richard?”

“I, ah…”

Gansey looked up, mildly surprised to see Henry awkwardly biting his lip. Henry was generally one of the most articulate people he could think of offhand – it was strange to find him at a loss for words. Maybe he was just drunk. And now Gansey was looking at Henry’s lip. He turned his gaze back to the cards, drawing a third.

“Ooh, you have three,” Henry exclaimed, rather transparently changing the subject. He swept the rest of the deck back up and turned it over in his hands, leaning forward far enough that Gansey could smell something citrus-y emanating from his collarbone. With a flourish, Henry flipped the first card over.

“This is your past, Ganseyboy.”

Gansey squinted. (Blue had insisted that his glasses would ‘ruin his costume’ so he’d left them at home, not expecting to have to read anything tonight.)

“Death.”

Henry chuckled. “It’s not like –”

Gansey nodded. “I know. It’s a… transformation.” That made sense. Gansey’s story was full of transformations. The most obvious one had taken place between high school and college – well, that in and of itself had been a little transformation – but the bigger transformation involved top surgery and a new passport. And there had been all these other little deaths over the years, too – his and Blue’s breakup, changing his major from business to history, Adam finding a boyfriend and subsequently having marginally less free time to share, and then a big death – Noah, his high school friend, whose absence continued to feel just as conspicuous as his presence had felt. Death was an apt card for Gansey’s past.

“What about the present?” he asked.

Card flip. “The Fool,” Henry intoned. Gansey could hear the smile in his voice, and it was hard to keep a smile off his own face. “Perhaps the cards are clocking you, Gans.”

Gansey huffed out a soft laugh. The glimmering purple light made him feel like they were underwater, in some mythical kingdom at the bottom of the sea. Or maybe this was all happening in a dream, and in a moment he’d wake up and Henry would just be his classmate.

“It means I’m at a crossroads, sort of. Like, the beginning of a new cycle. The wheel has turned back to the beginning. And in order to set it back in motion again, I have to, sort of just… go for it. Do something wild.”

“Who’s doing this reading, you or me?”

Gansey flicked his eyes up to meet Henry’s. His face was lit in coral and amber, ice blue highlighter adding shimmering contour, and a loose lock of hair had fallen onto his forehead and his eyes were crystal black portals into the otherworld. He looked like… something wild.

Gansey dropped his gaze. “The future,” he heard his own voice say.

He turned the card over, leaning forward to read it with his un-bespectacled eyes. “The… Queen of Wands.”

“Someone dynamic,” Henry chimed in. “Someone full of ideas and energy and passion. A real firecracker, this one. They’re going to alight in your life like a magic dragonfly. Or the – the energy will. Maybe you have to be this person, Mr. Gansey. Let out that zany side of yourself!”

Gansey hummed noncommittally. He didn’t think the Queen of Wands was him. On this night, in this light, with music thrumming in the walls and colors swirling on the ceiling and his heart in his throat and this scintillating starburst of a person with still, still eyes in front of him – he thought he knew exactly who the Queen of Wands was. But he didn’t want to say it because he still wasn’t totally convinced he wasn’t dreaming.

They locked eyes again, and Gansey made himself keep looking this time even though he felt like he was in a wind tunnel. He’d never understood that saying about how ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’ until now, because Henry’s eyes were windows to a quiet house. A beautiful, unexpected house. A house, Gansey realized, where he would like to live. And he felt his mouth open like he was going to say something, but he didn’t know what.

“Dick! I’ve been looking for you forever! Where have you been? Usually you’re the one trying to drag me away from parties!”

And Blue’s thrift-store Docs were thumping down the stairs, and her bizarrely strong hands were pulling him up by the bicep. Henry was staring at her like he was trying to figure out if she was a real person or a figment of his imagination, and she was looking back in much the same way.

“I –” Gansey didn’t know how to describe what he’d just been doing. ‘Having my tarot read by a classmate’ didn’t seem to cut it.

Gansey didn’t remember much about the rest of that night. Only that Henry vanished much as he had that day after class, as if he’d only ever been some kind of fairy prince flitting in and out of the realm of human beings, and that he and Blue ate instant rice on the floor of their apartment at two am while watching old Riverdale episodes until they both curled up and fell asleep on the squashy sofa.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when Gansey woke up halfway through the day with terrible bedhead and glitter stuck to his cheek, that he discovered the Lisa Frank Queen of Wands card tucked into the pocket of Ronan’s leather jacket. How had it gotten there? Had Gansey unintentionally stolen it? Had Henry somehow slipped it in?

Either way, it felt like a mystical sign that the night had really happened, and maybe the future he’d seen in the cards had been more real than it seemed. Something sparkled in his veins.

He was looking forward to world politics class on Monday.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! This is a tidbit from a multichaptered fic that I've outlined in this universe that I may still eventually write <3 Fic title is from the Grouplove song


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